There have been cases of mysteriously abandoned ships recorded throughout history. They even have a poetic name: ships without a soul. The Marie Celeste is just the most famous of a whole list of ghost vessels; derelict ships with no signs of a struggle, just a logbook that ends for no reason, and sometimes food still left on the table.
In Manel Loureiro’s latest book, The Last Passenger, a cargo ship stumbles across just such a mystery in the middle of the North Atlantic in 1939. There’s no obvious reason for the Valkyrie to have been abandoned; the ship isn’t damaged, and all of the lifeboats are still place. But the entire luxury ship (covered in symbols of the growing Nazi party) is deserted, except for a blanket-wrapped baby found in the middle of a ballroom with the remains of a party that seems to have just…stopped. Those exploring the ship are quickly chased away by strange voices and moving shadows, and one man loses his sanity after an attack by unseen forces. The baby is left at an orphanage, and the Valkyre – who’s engines resist any effort to be repaired – is towed to a scrapyard and then forgotten.
Seventy years later, the journalist Kate Soto is given a unique opportunity: to travel with the eccentric millionaire Isaac Feldman on the refurbished Valkyrie in a repeat of its maiden voyage. Accompanied by a crowd of scientists, some with their own hidden agendas, Isaac hopes to unlock the secret of his own past, and find out what happened to cause the disappearance of every passenger aboard.
Ghosts ships are a wealth of possible story ideas. You can pretty much take any genre – fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, action-adventure, etc. – and come up with something from each one to account for the mysterious disappearance of a ship’s crew. Loureiro’s explanation for the Valkyrie involves time-travel, with a little bit of Nazi-conspiracy and Jewish Kabbalah thrown in for variety. The ship also appears to be cursed, so in addition to the original disappearance of the crew and passengers there are a lot of other unexplained events (usually involving someone going insane) that keep the plot moving.
In fact the ship may actually be alive in some way, so Loureiro also has the opportunity to create some suitably creepy images when whatever it is that’s infested the ship starts messing with people’s minds. Figures wearing clothing from the late 30’s appear out of nowhere, only to disappear once they’ve walked around a corner. Random passengers start speaking in German, but of course don’t remember doing so when you ask what the hell they just said. Sections of the ship that haven’t been renovated yet will appear brand-new, but only part of the time. One of the most effective scenes was Kate running through the lower decks with only her camera flash to light the way. The ship looks like it’s in impossibly pristine condition in the split-seconds she can see, but the display on her camera shows pictures of rust and cobwebs and wood paneling crumbling to dust.
The writing can be a tad stilted (the phrase “I beg of you” is used four times in the book, which in my opinion is four times too many for a modern setting), but I think some of that could be due to the fact that it’s been translated to English. For the most part what kept me from completely enjoying this book was that there were too many sub-plots for any of the characters to get beyond two-dimensional status. Isaac searching for his origin, Kate trying to get past the death of her husband, a survivor of Bosnia dealing with her own trauma, a shadow-organization looking to travel back in time to give some much-needed plot points to Hitler, it all just became too much to follow.
The author tried to create depth for each character by throwing in paragraphs of back-story all at once, which means there wasn’t enough time to identify with anyone before they fell under the influence of the ship (and resulting in some cringe-worthy dialog when the personality taking over the character was the standard Sadistic Nazi Bad-Guy). The reader is expected to swallow a lot of magical thinking in order to accept the plot (of course traveling on the ship on the same day of the year as its first voyage would cause it to go back in time, why wouldn’t it?), a ghost shows up as a deus ex machina that’s never really explained, and there are a few romantic scenes that couldn’t have been more ham-handed if the author had just shouted, “And now they have SEX!”
All of the separate storylines come together in the end, more or less, but it felt a little like putting together a puzzle by cramming the pieces in place regardless of whether they actually fit. The picture you get from it is interesting, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.